A RESPONSE TO JACKSON MAC LOW AND ANDREW LEVY

Alan Filreis

Where else but at a PhillyTalks session--the post-reading
discussion
veering, digressing, everyone hearing their own stomachs, half-attending
to the redolence of vegetarian lasagna in the Writers House kitchen--could
Andrew Levy say he likes Jack Spicer because, of all things, there are
"beings in his poems"? This was remarkable in itself. But then,
what's
more, he got away with it, and, still more, he and others and then Jackson
Mac Low himself, extended the idea.

Mac Low had already offered his commentary on Levy in verse, by making his
"Diastic Derived from Andrew Levy's Poem 'Struggle Against Misery," a
non-intentional response to what Mac Low recognized was a very personal
poem.<1> In the diastic derivation one cannot help but read Levy's
original pronouns, personal in the poem about love ("my,"
"yourself"--lovers' I and you), as transposed to the relational space
experimentally occupied by Levy and Mac Low. For example, the triad

would seem now to be available as part of the dialogue between the two
poets--indeed, as an aspect of the usual PhillyTalks convergence.

Now, with Jackson Mac Low sitting next to him, Levy seemed ready to move
the conversation toward an idea of personhood in the poetic work of
appropriation. Mac Low offered an instant admonition. "[T]hese," he said
(presumably he meant Jack Spicer's words and phrases), are "dictated from
outside"--they're "beamed down" not be'd. Louis Cabri is right to think
Mac Low was here half-punning (being, beamed), but he was also of course
quoting a bit of mass sci fi pop-cultural phrasing, the equivalent of
"coming from nowhere." In any event, Levy pressed on, some in attendance
joining him, making an impromptu case for a kind of personal being
pertinent to the radically disjunctive poetics both these writers
practice. And then, with Mac Low's final improvised commentary on "spirit"
("a word I never use," he said--whereupon we knew this was a significant
occasion) we arrived at a grammatical politics of "saving," a gesture
taking its meaning at least temporarily from the religious analogue.

Of course this is a notion of salvation that comes out the far side of the
randomly constructed. By no means was this PhillyTalks event some
rearguard action against the radicalism of Mac Low or of Ron Silliman (who
briefly joined the conversation), or even against the well-developed
anti-ego psychology in the poetry of Bob Perelman. Perelman, though
absent, was passingly invoked by Mac Low this night as the guy, or perhaps
as the sort of guy, who would remind us that Pound was a fascist and
therefore the Pisan Cantos cannot be beautiful. (Silliman dodged Mac Low's
attempt to bring him into this shrewdly obvious point, by contending that,
well, the Van Buren cantos were politically worse. Perelman's The
Trouble
with Genius [1994], in any event, contends otherwise about Pound.)
MacLow's mention of what Perelman might say to someone taking seriously
"Pound's better self" was a self-parodic but helpful bit of adherence to
what no one in the room would have called political correctness.

How had we gotten to this point? I offer a pointed summary.

At first one heard some of the usual talk about whether "the culture" (at
large) is "continuous with what's going on in poetry and art." In an aside
he probably felt would lead nowhere, Levy noted that he is "still
interested" in "self." Not, to be sure, the self of psychic or emotional
(read: "lyric") personal expression. In his PhillyTalks 2 piece,
his
commentary on Mac Low's Barnesbook: four poems derived from sentences
by
Djuna Barnes (1996), Levy had observed in Mac Low's rendering of
Barnes
the "recontextualizings of fortitude" and other explicitly personal
qualities; "innocence" was another. Here then, in the live discussion,
Levy was rehearsing a persistent concern, only more generally. In
response Mac Low insisted that in his Barnesbook he uses Djuna Barnes's
words "strictly as material," a process by which he strips the words of
Barnes's sentence-to-sentence and intra-sentence identity. Levy's question
was: What is left of Barnes in this work? Levy was attempting to turn a
corner, hoping more rather than less of Barnes has been "kept," observing
that Mac Low did after all "keep" something from or, perhaps, of Barnes.
(This is a key of, I would say, because it is an abstract idiomatic term
of appropriation more from Stevens than from Pound or Williams. I am
reminded of Marjorie Perloff's deliberately overstated but still acute
consideration of whose era it was--Pound's or Stevens's.<2> "The era" is
generally Pound's, to be sure--but Stevens I think silently supports Levy
here, with his post-romantic, post-psychological language of of --
obscuring yet broadening the concept of accompaniment.<3> Mac Low's
rejoinder insisted again that even names (proper names, fictional
characters, etc.) "kept" or "saved" from Barnes' books in
Barnesbook have
come only by way of "certain" random-digit triplets<4>--by virtue of an
unvaried machine-made pattern used to construct the new work.

I take it that the only reason a minor disagreement here produced a new
and more interesting agreement--Mac Low's idea of remnant spirit as an
element of resistant politics--was because of the social-aesthetic compact
implicit in the design of the PhillyTalks series itself. In the
PhillyTalks series at The Writers House, somewhat unlikely pairs of "more
senior" and "more junior" experimental writers are brought together to
produce a new if only momentary combination. Levy's modest resistance to
Mac Low -- "but you kept" something of Barnes -- had to be politely
accommodated. Yet I noted with interest that this occasional disposition
induced Mac Low to recall the cold-war languages of the 1940s and 50s,
while at the same time it seemed to take him to a new approach to an old
question. Just as these two writers were talking about Mac Low's
appropriation of Barnes, and of Spicer's of Lorca, they had of course come
to Philadelphia to work through MacLow's of Levy. So where was Levy in all
this? "Diastic Derived from Andrew Levy's Poem 'Struggle Against Misery'"
and the two "travesties" of that very diastic, vintage performative Mac
Low, "kept" less of Levy than apparently Levy now felt was apt. For Levy
of*Mac Low there is only an inside, not even the "outside" Mac Low
claims to know in his use of the phrase "beamed up." He beamed up Levy as
he had beamed up Barnes--and then what? PhillyTalks--especially during
the collaborative chat after the double reading--stages the social compact
more forgivingly than diastic or other mutual appropriations that precede
the day. Mac Low's mild rebuke ("Well," he said, "those names are words
that came into the poems where they did because certain random-digit
triplets...") didn't get the last word. Cabri and Mike Magee come to the
aid. Is the singular "I" an organizing point? Can one come to see the
Barnes piece as having some of the qualities of personality? And
implicitly: Is what is "kept" of Levy in the diastic derivation analogous
to a kind of person? They and others were doubtless thinking of Mac Low's
relationship with Barnes as described in the Afterword to
Barnesbook: "it
is only a dialogue by courtesy," that "only" being somewhat haunting in
its impersonality.<5>) Levy could now comment on the "poem-as-person" as
developing, always never-quite-arrived. Aided again by Cabri, Levy then
offered his disarming assertion that there are beings in Jack SpicerAs
poems. Mac Low stole the show for a moment by talking about "beaming
down," as noted earlier. But Levy only reasserted that appropriations are
occasions that are dialogues with the source materials, likened to a
"dialogue with another person." Heather Starr then anchored the point with
a footnote, citing the claim that in some modern painting a shape
interacts with another shape on the model of relationships between people.
Levy then felt the need to predate postmodernism by many centuries, citing
Basho among others, in a gesture meant to be a small ironic victory over
all the gloating about the special achievements of contemporary writing. A
stage was set for the "saving"--in the earlier, milder term, for the
"keeping"--of the politically good via the syntactically disjunctive.

By the time Mac Low came finally back, offering a long statement near the
end of the evening, he was prepared to re-describe his process in a
political language that I take to be a significant interpretive tool in
the work of understanding Mac Low's sensibility in relation to the cold
war, and the origins, in the 1950s, of his radically appropriative manner.

Mac Low said he believes he is "saving the sparks" of the creator's
"spirit" when he works from inside "a book that was composed for some
horrible reason." In this respect Mac Low was bearing witness to the
formation of an internally resistant, self-consciously radical political
logic that postdated modernism but predated the new left. He and his
method came of age, in the late 1940s and '50s, when the Rand Corporation
invented, among other texts, its random-digit book to achieve "mad"
military objectives. Who were the authors? "Good mathematicians," he
reminded us, whose relationship with the Navy's cold-war leader, James
Forrestal, was in this special sense textual.

How does one read that relationship, or unread it? Mac Low told us about
Forrestal (1892-1949), correctly pointing out that the Secretary was
"literally mad, paranoic and extremely depressive, and ended up by
throwing himself from the window of a mental hospital."<6> This capsule
cold-war biography had an essential but partly hidden purpose in the Mac
Low-Levy transaction. It was a sage chiding, and also an invitation. It
has become too easy just to assert that (without saying specifically how)
disjunctive poetics enabled avant-gardists in a time of anti-radicalism,
in that period when old left was disintegrating and new left hadn't been
born, to refuse belief in cold-war rhetoric at the level of the paragraph,
or even of the sentence or phrase--to show how they got behind the very
syntax or structure of the way things were being meant and accepted as
meaningful.<7>

Mac Low is reminding us that in a sense the making of his own disjunctive
style entailed something like the salvation of good mathematicians as
creators of literal doomsday language machines. That Mac Low so completely
apologized for such talk ("spirit" is a word "I never use, and here I'm
using it in public!"; "This is awfully spooky! I don't usually talk about
such things") makes this vital testimony to the idea of looking back to
the political origins of the urgent need to dislocate the poetic "being"
from or from within the state--to avoid the textual fate of the "good
mathematicians." When Mac Low teaches us about "this kabbalistic idea of
'saving the sparks,'" he is not the least bit contradicting himself in
response to Andrew Levy's sensible ethical desire for a modestly more
personal or "conservative" concept of the self in contemporary writing--to
"keep" something of Barnes when appropriating her. Jackson Mac Low is
consistently contending that the main work is not in the whole thing
itself ("the project," we like to say), but, sometimes, in the chips and
bits that fall from the workbench of Rand's and other shops' projects. In
these bits, which can be assembled, are something like the vestiges of
people. "When you do this," Mac Low told us, "you're . . . making
artworks, that is to say, persons out of them."

Mac Low provides the terms of his own saving as well. As Levy points out,
via Robert Kocik, "The poet's place is at the point of pure research in
any materialization."<8> Mac Low's cold-war anecdote about the Rand/Navy
work serves to warn us of the risk of "pure research" in this sense.
After all, such abstractions can be taken in right or left directions.

<2> Marjorie Perloff, "Pound/Stevens: Whose Era?" New Literary
History
13:3 (Spring 1982): 485. The title obviously responds to Hugh Kenner's
The
Pound Era (1971), and to counterclaims made against KennerAs
presumption.

<3> Stevens used "of" repeatedly to signify distinctions between
inherence and about-ness. For instance, "The poem is the cry of its
occasion," not about ("An Ordinary Evening in New Haven"). Levy's
phrase-by-phrase rhetorical debt to Stevens is worth, I think, some
examination in itself. I'd contend that Stevens is surprisingly quite
vocal in Levy's poetry, for example in this stanza from "Struggle Against
Misery":

An immaculate image
must be a fiction. It is
time to choose. The lights burning out
pull down the shades. Not metaphor.

<6> Forrestal had become Secretary of the Navy in 1944, and, after the
army and navy were merged, served as the first Secretary of Defense.
Depressed by, among other things, what he regarded as unfair criticisms of
his handling of the air force, he entered the Navy hospital to be treated
for what was publicly called "nervous exhaustion"; in May 1949, though he
appeared to be recovering, he leaped from a high window in the hospital.

<7> It is somewhat similarly insufficient, I think, to praise the
political-historiographical acuity in Robert Lowell's use of John Foster
Dulles's euphemistic phrase "agonizing reappraisal" in a poem, referring
to aggressive diplomatic fibbing about U.S. first-strike nuclear policy,
as merely have a relation to the relaxing of Lowell's poetic line in Life
Studies.

<8> Kocik is being quoted from memory by Levy in his (Levy's)
PhillyTalks
2 piece.